R.I.P.
A few days ago I posted something about the quest for longevity and attempted to imply that I though quality was preferable over quantity. I thought that perhaps my friend Tony might have some thoughts on the subject. Today I learned that whatever thoughts Tony has on the subject he will be keeping to himself. My heart goes out to Shunji, his partner of 30+ years.
Tony and I met shortly after I came out, during my fifteen seconds of fame when I made the front page of PlanetOut with a comment I had made on the Boy Scouts, which was a hot topic at the time. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that fighting legal battles in the courts that would certainly take years, was a waste of time and ignored the needs of boys today. I suggested the Boy Scouts be left to their bigotry and someone start up a different scouting program based on different and more inclusive values. It was a radical suggestion given the tone of the discussion, and it caught Tony's eye. He emailed me and we corresponded for a bit before I met him during a business trip to NYC. I spent a fair amount of time in New York at that time. Every trip included an evening at Tony's apartment in Greenwich Village.
Tony once told me he was a yellow dog democrat. Unfamiliar with the term, I asked him what that meant. "It means I'd vote for a yellow dog if it were a democrat." He was farther left of center than anyone else I knew personally and we often had lively debates on various subjects, not the least of which was religion. I'm more or less neutral about religion in general, but Tony had a more Marxist view of religion being the opium of the masses. Born and raised Catholic, attending Jesuit schools and even spending some time at Oxford, Tony had become an avowed atheist by the time I met him. He tried to bring me around to his way of thinking without success. It was one of many topics where we agreed to disagree. Still, he attended services at Grace Cathedral with Brian and I during our Sonoma trip. After what I thought was an excellent sermon on the importance of reason and personal integrity in discovering Truth, I was pleased to see him donate to the offering plate when it came around. When I asked him about it he told me he was happy to support humble, rational people wherever they may be found.
I wish I there had been time to cook him a meal, he always dubious about my claims to cooking skills. It was something I was going to do my next trip to visit. I wish he had had the chance to meet D.
He told me on more than one occasion that if there was an afterlife, he was coming back to haunt me. I always told him I looked forward to it. He has, as of today, yet to make good on his promise.
Peace, my friend.
WTF?
In a recent column in the Opinion Journal, Daniel Henninger talks at some length about the prevalence of vulgar language in the blogosphere and wonders at the trend of "disinhibited language" in society.1 I am hardly innocent of waxing vulgar in my own blog, and I really don't have any problems with vulgarity judiciously applied. I do think there comes a point, however, when vulgarity only shows you don't have anything more intelligent to say and the frequent use of, shall we say, colorful metaphors just makes me want to tune the speaker, or writer, out.
Case in point: Mr. Henninger talks about "The Sopranos" (indeed pretty much any of HBO's serials) as a prime example of the "disinhibited volcabulary" acceptable in society today. I don't have HBO, so I couldn't watch their shows if I wanted to, but from the one or two episodes of "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood" I've seen, I wouldn't want to watch them if I could. I find the language overbearing and don't care to wade through the vulgarity to find whatever story might be hidden behind it.
While Mr. Henninger and I probably have broadly similar concerns about a society's descent into the vulgar, what really caught my attention was the following statement.
The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially.
It never ceases to amaze me how the conservative male conflates his class with humanity at large. Who really defined appropriate language in our society? The landed and the educated, in other words, the wealthy elite. Language was one badge of the aristocracy and a key indicator of social class. In fact, it still is. How often do you hear someone with a thick accent and your first impulse is to assume they're uneducated if not outright dumb? The assumption is an education would have weaned them from their vulgar2 language. You can dress up someone from the lower classes in fine clothing, but their language will betray them every time. Even in societies where personal restraint is paramount, such as Asia, I suspect there are still class differences in personal expression. The point is, it has hardly been humanity who has made these determinations, but the ruling classes, a rather small percentage of "the human species."
I have to wonder if the root of many conservative causes wasn't (and isn't) so much any kind of true morality as it was a concern that the aristocracy is losing its power to exert its will on society at large. The aristocracy in the U.S. may not be as blatantly oppressive as it was in feudal days of yore, but it still exists. Think on this: Only one in four Americans has a college degree. The Internet has certainly given people from all walks of life a public outlet for self-expression, something once regulated by society via editors and review boards of all different stripes.
I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. I'm certainly not in favor of dumbing down society, but I'm not sure what else people to expect to happen. Not only do educational opportunities remain out of reach of the lower classes, but they are often actively discouraged from pursuing them.
Mostly useless bits of information
Beer may increase your risk of lung cancer but wine may lower it. In one study, "after smoking was discounted, drinking up to six beers per week increased the risk of lung cancer by 20 percent, and by 50 percent for seven or more beers consumed in the same period." In another study, "beer appeared harmful to men who did not eat fruit and vegetables regularly while men who drank wine saw their lung cancer risk drop by 40 percent, and women by 70 percent." Interpretations: 1) Beer causes cancer; wine prevents cancer. 2) Beer drinkers eat fried food, which causes cancer; wine drinkers eat vegetables, which prevent cancer. 3) Wine drinkers, being richer and better educated than beer drinkers, take better care of their bodies in lots of ways.1
This is what is called useless information, also known as getting bit in the ass by extraneous variables. It seems highly unlikely that beer causes lung cancer. It seems much more likely that the lifestyle of someone who is consuming at least a beer a day includes other activities which increase the risk, for example how about where the beer is consumed? I don't have any hard figures to back it up, but it seems to me more beer by far is consumed in smoke filled bars than wine. Gee, might second hand smoke have something to do with it? Is there a difference between men who have a single beer every night after work and those who down a six pack on a Friday night? This is mildly interesting correlational information, but in the end not terribly useful.
Here's more even more useless information: The United States has a 50% divorce rate. This number is derived thusly: There were x number of marriages last year. There were y number of divorces last year. x = 2y, therefore we have a 50% divorce rate! Question: what do the people getting married last year have to do with the people getting divorced last year? Not a damn thing, save for those who got married and divorced last year. A more accurate measure of the divorce rate is to compare the number of existing marriages (60,000,000) with how many end in divorce in a given year(1,250,000). That number is about 2%. In other words you have a 98% chance of still being married at the end of any given year.2 So much for marriage being a dying institution.
Interpretations: 1) Don't believe everything you read. 2) Unscrupulous people will crunch numbers and invent flimsy statistics that favor their arguments. 3)The conservative wingnut doomsdayers either have no idea what they are talking about, or are deliberately misleading the American public. You decide which is worse.
2Henslin, James M., Essentials of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach, sixth edition (Boston: Pearson A&B, 2006) 331.
Spring has sprung.
Despite the jokes Mother Nature likes to play—like the 1" of snow we got on Monday—Spring is well underway. I'm amazed by these guys growing in a dirt patch the builder left ibetween my and my neighbor's garages. I planted a couple single plants a few years ago. They died in pretty short order. It gets extremely hot in that spot in the summer time, getting full sun as it does for well over 8 hours a day. I'd have to soak the ground every single day to keep whatever is trying to grow there alive, and I'm just not conscientious enough to do that.
Oddly enough, these guys keep coming back. Last year I pulled up what came up and moved them to the flower bed in the back yard. It's a little more sheltered back there, but I still neglected to water them enough and they didn't last. I have no idea how these guys propagate, but image my surprise when they popped here again. Last year they didn't get any bigger than the bunch in the middle. Look at them now. Oddly enough nothing came up in the back yard. I'm sure there's some horticulturalist out there who can probably tell me what's going on. It will be interesting to see what happens next Spring. In the meantime, here's hoping I can keep them alive at least into July.
Voting Incentives
GayProf over at Center of Gravitas has some suggestions for solving voter apathy in the U.S.
To increase the number of gay men voters, let's make the voting machines dual purpose. Why not be able to cast your vote within a tanning booth? Elections are always in November, just the time that your summer glow starts to fade. With the tanning option, you can save democracy and look unseasonably golden brown. Lines at polling places would be around the block in West Hollywood.
"Let's follow the lead of some other nations and tax the shit out of the lazy-ass people who don't vote. The fate of the national debt, war, the education system, and environmental disaster might not be big enough issues to get some people to the polls. If not voting means, though, they have to pay a tax the size of their monthly Starbucks tab, they'll drive their Escalades right into the voting booth.
"Speaking of Escalades, why not give out a free gallon of gas with every voter registered? Have you seen gas prices these days? Those Escalades burn-up four gallons just to roll down the windows. Toss a little petroleum in to sweeten the voting deal.
"Voting booths can dispense drugs depending on which party you opted to choose. After the pull of the lever, Democrats could get Xanax. This should dull the pain of voting for the 'lesser of two evils' and knowing that you likely lost anyway. The Green Party, naturally, would receive a joint. It can replace the one that they smoked while they were voting. The Republican Party could receive Acid. After all, they live in their own reality already, so why not have a legitimate excuse?1
He also so has some more salient observations about voting and the American public I think worth the read. Check it out.
Of Angels and Fools
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game.
Too late for second guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap."Defying Gravity," Wicked
I'm sure these lyrics are familiar to many by now. If you had asked me about my life a year ago, I would have told you that I have a pretty good life and the only thing I felt was lacking was someone to share it with. Today I feel like my life has done a complete 180. Everything seems in disarray and D is the only thing that isn't causing me stress.
Which isn't to say my life is bad. It's just that it is about to take a radical change in direction and I really have no idea what to expect. I am ditching a 12 year old career that has ceased to bring fulfillment and has, in fact, become something of an anchor. Actually, cement galoshes is more like it. Come August I'll be going back to school full time and I'm not sure at this point how I will be making my mortgage payments much less how I will continue to pay child support.
Despite my anxiety, it feels like the right course for my life and I'm grateful for D's soothing presence and unfailing support. Now if I could just muster Elpheba's gusto with which she jumped into the unknown, I'd be set.
Our obsession with longevity
Biomarkers suggest a very low-calorie diet might slow human aging. Compared to a control group, people who ate 25 percent fewer calories than the recommended daily allowance (and people who ate 12.5 percent fewer calories than the RDA while getting 12.5 percent more exercise) developed lower body temperatures and significantly lower insulin levels and DNA damage, which correlate with longevity. This follows previous studies in which 1) a very low-calorie diet apparently slowed heart aging in humans and 2) animals on such diets exceeded their species' maximum life spans. Proposed mechanism: Your body slows down to keep you alive, because it thinks you're starving. Possible conclusions: 1) Put down the sandwich and back away slowly. 2) Wait to see whether people with better biomarkers live longer. 3) Cauliflower and oats for dinner again? Kill me now.1
I recently picked a new primary care doctor. After two visits and exhaustive lab tests, he said I was doing "fairly well" for my age. A little concerned about that comment, I couldn't resist asking him, "Do you think I'll live to be 80?"
He perked up and asked, "Do you eat rib-eye steaks and barbecued ribs?"
I said, "No, my former doctor said that all red meat is very unhealthy!"
"Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like swimming, running, playing golf, sailing, hiking, or bicycling?"
"No, I don't," I said.
He asked, "Do you drive fast cars, or have a lot of sex?"
"No," I said. "I don't do any of those things."
He looked at me and said, "Then, why do you care?"
Christianity has a fine tradition of misery equating to righteousness. Life was not meant to be enjoyed and if you're having a good time, then God is going to send you to Hell for eternity to make sure you suffer. Don't get that. I dated a guy who was (is?) more or less addicted to diet Dr. Pepper. He used to say that it was probably shortening his life, but he just couldn't bring himself to give it up. My response was always, "Beh. We're all going to die. You may as well enjoy yourself while you're here."
I imagine Tony has some insight on the subject, closer as he is to the end of his run. Tony?
Gay marriage <> Polygamy
The religious right loves talking about slippery slopes. "If we let a man marry a man what's to prevent a man from marrying his dog?" Only slightly more credible is the "slippery slope to legalized polygamy." I've never bought it, thought I couldn't tell you exactly why beyond the obvious that homosexuals are talking about marriage in the "traditional" sense. Oooo. Did I just say that?
The fact is polygamy, specifically polygany, has quite a long history. Perhaps it made sense in agrarian societies when cheap farm labor was desirable. Perhaps it made sense when young men had high mortality rates thanks to tribal warfare. Perhaps it made sense when women were considered commodities and thus amassing women sated the apparent human tendency to amass power or wealth. None of those really apply anymore, so any benefits derived by society from this arrangement have evaporated as well.
I recently read two good articles about the consequences of polygamy: one about the personal implications of polygamy and one about the social implications. Here are a few excerpts.
If, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices," then "on what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?"
Here's the answer. The number isn't two. It's one. You commit to one person, and that person commits wholly to you. Second, the number isn't arbitrary. It's based on human nature. Specifically, on jealousy.
The average guy would love to bang his neighbor's wife. He just doesn't want his wife banging his neighbor. Fidelity isn't natural, but jealousy is. Hence the one-spouse rule. One isn't the number of people you want to sleep with. It's the number of people you want your spouse to sleep with.
Women shared husbands because they had to. The alternative was poverty. As women gained power, they began to choose what they really wanted. And what they really wanted was the same fidelity that men expected from them.
Gays who seek to marry want the same thing. They're not looking for the right to sleep around. They already have that. It's called dating. A friend once explained to me why gay men have sex on the first date: Nobody says no. Your partner, being of the same sex, is as eager as you are to get it on. But he's also as eager as you are to get it on with somebody else. And if you really like him, you don't want that. You want him all to yourself. That's why marriage, not polygamy, is in your nature, and in our future.1
So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.
Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.
"Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages -- money, skills, education -- will marry, but men without such advantages -- poor, unskilled, illiterate -- will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population."
Crime rates tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.)
Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street -- literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness."
The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands.
By this point it should be obvious that polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it. 2
2Rauch, Jonathan, "One Man, Many Wives, Big Problems," National Journal, March 31, 2006, nationaljournal.com (This link doesn't look all that permanent)